Gov. Corbett helps break ground for new public safety center

Building will house Cetronia Ambulance Corps and county groups.

Gov. Tom Corbett joined Cetronia Ambulance Corps and Lehigh County to break… (Chris Post, SPECIAL TO THE…)

February 21, 2013|By Daniel Patrick Sheehan, Of The Morning Call

Gov. Tom Corbett and other dignitaries broke ground Thursday in South Whitehall Township for the 68,000-square-foot center that will house the Cetronia Ambulance Corps and various Lehigh County public safety agencies.

The building, with its jaw-breaking name — the Cetronia Ambulance and Lehigh County Joint Operations and Medico-Legal Forensics Center — has been planned for years. It's the result of a partnership between the county and Cetronia, a 57-year-old nonprofit agency that began life as a volunteer group running a single station wagon ambulance and is now the region's largest emergency services provider.

The county donated the land at Broadway and Parkway Road and will equip and stock a 10,000-square-foot coroner's office, which will be twice as large as the present facility in the old county courthouse on Hamilton Street in Allentown.

The bulk of the $10 million construction cost is being born by Cetronia, which raised money, took low-interest construction loans and obtained a $1.7 million grant from the state.

Service Electric Cable and the family of its late CEO, John E. Walson, who died last summer, donated $275,000. For that, the emergency communications center in the building will bear Walson's name.

Officials said they hope to have a dedication ceremony at the new building in about a year — though Corbett and other speakers, noting the freezing temperatures and brisk wind beating at the tent where the groundbreaking was held, hoped it would be in a warmer month.

The ambulance company's expansion will consolidate its fleet of 19 ambulances and other emergency vehicles and create a hub for its 200 employees, who serve about 100,000 people in the coverage area. Emergency workers are deployed from a leased building in Fogelsville and the company's Broadway headquarters, which will be sold once Cetronia relocates.

Since 1989, the company has grown from serving 10,000 callers a year to making more than 35,000 runs a year.

Those numbers are only expected to grow, given population projections for the Lehigh Valley over the next 20 years — particularly for the senior population — so officials said the expansion will be critical to meeting future demand.

Corbett said the project is the fruit of an exemplary partnership and said it will strengthen what he called the primary core function of government, public safety.

It's been a major concern for Corbett, who has signed a half-dozen emergency declarations in his two years as governor because of flooding and other natural disasters.

"We don't speak often enough about our emergency service providers," Corbett said. "Emergency medical technicians and paramedics do the same thing police officers and firefighters do. They run toward danger."

Cetronia, he added, "is a great example of the spirit of emergency providers." And he called the future headquarters "a symbol of how state, county and local government can work together."

Joseph Schmider, director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Emergency Medical Services, said the state's 60,000 EMS providers respond to a call every 3.6 seconds.

"It's an exciting time in EMS when these kinds of collaborations and partnerships come together," he said.